What exactly does a "content agency" do anyway, and how does it relate to the thousands of other agencies, teams, and functions that make up the digital marketing mix of our typical client?

In the two months since joining the team here at Pace, I've been asked to explain the answer to that question more than a few times. As this is my first blog post for Pace, I thought I'd lead off with my answer: At Pace we craft remarkable branded content and unique owned media properties, and feed those into our clients' marketing and communications efforts through what I'll call the content engine.

The content engine is an imperfect analogy, and the idea of using an engine to describe marketing or communications efforts isn't exactly an earth-shattering new idea. But I've grown to love it. The idea of the content engine nicely pulls together the wide range of things we do here at Pace into a simple flow: You build the engine, fuel it, and constantly fine tune it. Strategies, sites, publications, processes, and so on are the engine itself; content is the fuel; analytics and insights are how you fine tune it.

In slightly more detail:

1. Build the Engine

Like most things in marketing, it all starts with the content and engagement strategy (or blueprint). By using research and subject matter experts you must determine what content, shared through what channels, programs, and tactics, will produce the best possible ROI for our clients.

From there we lay the groundwork, building the core platforms (the physical components of the engine). This could take the form of websites, blogs, tablet-optimized experiences, native mobile apps, guides, or branded print magazines. These core platforms will form the core of the content distribution strategy. 

Lastly, we work with our clients and their partners to tightly integrate the engine with other distribution and publishing channels. Done correctly, the content engine helps power the social media team's editorial calendar, the PR team's pitches, the relationship marketing team's e-newsletters, the field sales team's training, and so on.

2. Provide the Fuel

An engine is worthless without the fuel that powers it. In this case, that fuel is an ongoing stream of well-crafted content that clearly hits on the needs of our client in addition to the interests and passions of their customers, partners, and employees. That content must then be optimized for the channel it's flowing out through, whether that happens by applying SEO best practices to a web article, designing a beautiful print layout, or creating a highly shareable tweet.

3. Constantly Fine Tune It

Even the most finely crafted engine needs monitoring, maintenance, and adjustment to ensure it's running at peak performance. For a content engine this means analytics, continuous learning and refinement, and reporting to understand what content is working (or not) and why, in the context of the channel in which it lives.

The content engine, when used properly, is an indispensable component of the overall marketing communications effort within most companies. It connects to and feeds the insatiable demand for high-quality, targeted content required by email marketing, social media, digital properties, event marketing, and so on. I joined Pace in part because that engine is so central to the marketing success of brands everywhere, and it's exciting to help develop and shape it. 

I'll explore this idea in more detail later, and you'll see it weave in and out of future posts. In the meantime, I'd love your perspective on the content engine and what role it does - and should - play.

*Photo by braintoad via CC license

It was good knowing you. But this farewell has been coming for a while now—you know that, right? It’s not as if this is a Bolt out of the blue or a message arriving from another Galaxy, is it? And I think she’s somewhat Siri that she’s come over so dominantly sexy, but the signs have been there for a long while, and you can’t really blame her for your own self-neglect, can you?

I mean, Apps, BB—you knew what the competition was. You know I would have continued to forgive you your clunky double move to delete emails. And you know how much the IT folks protected you with your double layers of security that gave them chills as they fired up your special servers. But people were beginning to talk, you know? And it wasn’t easy for me, either. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have to pretend to know what Yelp is? And to look at your pathetic little screen and to fake that you were giving me directions to my appointment when I knew full well that you’d only share my whereabouts with the government and not with me? I don’t mind the not being cool, because I’m a business guy after all, but yes, I’ll admit it: There were more and more mornings when I was wishing I was that person at Starbucks waving my App in front of the scanner and not fumbling for my Gold card that never swipes …

You started a thousand days for me—your blinking red light comforting me with the knowledge that the world had turned during the night and that the spammers and the email newsletter providers had completed their tasks of filling executive inboxes like so many secret Santas. And you were a badge of honor for so long, I admit. With your rugged looks and reliable, predictable ways, I took you for granted the same way as you did me. And I did; I thought it was forever.

Yes, she’s a vixen, BB, that Siri. And I admit, she has a couple of annoying habits—but it’s not just her looks—that’s what I want you to understand. She seems like the complete package, BB.  She’s smart, she’s intuitive … she, she just gets me, BB. And you’d stopped, you really had.

And I’m sorry, but I won’t miss you. There, I’ve said it.
Bye, Bye, Blackberry.

One of my favorite figures of speech—one I describe in my latest book—is what I call  the Mr. Potato Head. This cataloging figure breaks down a person or object into constituent parts, and then pretends that those parts came from elsewhere.

The journalist William Allen White used this device beautifully in his obituary of publisher Frank Munsey.

“The talent of a meat-packer, the morals of a moneychanger and the manners of an undertaker.”

With just three phrases, White gives you a vivid image of the oily crook. You can use it as a form of self-deprecating humor.

When I play tennis, I have the agility of a tank, the aim of a mole and the response time of FEMA.

The Mr. Potato Head comes in handy when you want to call attention to a variety of characteristics by exaggerating them. Say you want to describe a party you went to last Saturday: a chaotic, drunken mess with bad music, badly dressed guests, and the kind of mayo-drenched snacks that give people food poisoning. Instead of droning on and on about how awful it was, try chunking up a nice Potato Head.

A lovely party! The food of a bachelor’s fridge, the music playlist of an aging hair-band roadie, and guests straight out of “Dumb and Dumber,” without the witty dialogue.

Creating your own Mr. Potato Head isn’t hard. Just take a characteristic or part of the subject you want to describe, and come up with an analog for it. Then take the next characteristic or part, find an analog, and continue until your subject is thoroughly spudded. An analog is something that’s analogous—an analogy. We’ll get to the metaphorical kinds of analogies later. In the meantime, just look for similarities that create the effect you want. If you intend to make a subject look great, use flattering comparisons. Do the opposite if you want to abuse someone or something.

The book had the prose style of the Congressional Record, the characterization of a computer manual, and the suspense of a phone book.

Recently, I started my day, as I generally do, with a cup of Earl Grey and a quick browse around Google News. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that anyone use the crazy mashup of a Google News page as a usage guide, but this headline stood out as one I particularly disliked: “Stay true to yourself, advises previous woman winner of Nobel Peace Prize.”

I understand that in the story Jody Williams, a woman, is offering advice to recent female winners of the prize, so I suppose the fact that Williams is female is somewhat relevant. Nice as it would be if it were not news that the person winning the prize is female, there have been only 15 female recipients of the Peace Prize since its inception, of 101 total individual winners. But “previous woman winner”?  Yuck.

A quick Google search for “woman president” reveals plenty of news sources that seem to prefer this construction: CBS News, Forbes, MSNBC, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, The Guardian. And several Chicago Manual of Style forum posts vote for woman over female as a modifier.

I’m not an AP stickler, since I lean a bit more magazine-ish than some of AP’s newspaper-friendly guidelines, but I side firmly with the good ol’ Stylebook in this case: “Use female as an adjective, not woman. She is the first female governor of North Carolina.”

The late William Safire explored this topic back in 2007. “In modifying another noun,” he wrote, “woman is what the O.E.D. [Oxford English Dictionary] labels an apposite noun—explaining, even identifying, the noun it ‘stands next to’—but syntactically stronger than an adjective. Both words [woman and female] can be used as modifiers of nouns, but the noun woman has more weight.”

Hmmm. I get that “woman doctor” may cast more of a distinction than “female doctor”—or just plain old doctor—on the remarkable (gasp) fact of a woman being a doctor. But I don’t like it. To me, the distinction is emphasized precisely because the phrase sounds so off to my ear. How about “man doctor”? “Man astronaut”? “Man president”? Even the often-derogatory usage “male nurse” uses male instead of man.

“There's nothing new about this,” Safire writes. “The use of woman as a modifier dates to 1300, with the poet John Dryden …" Um, yeah, the fact that the usage has a long history does not boost it in my esteem. There are a lot of historical usages that have fallen from favor today, with good reason.

Some feminists, Safire says, avoid female as an adjective because they feel it sounds disrespectful and could refer to any mammal, not just a human woman. Again, that’s just not doing it for me. Sure, let’s avoid “lady author,” but I’m with AP and the Grammar Girl on this one: “With a perfectly acceptable adjective like female available, I don't see any reason to push woman into the role.”

What do you think? Let me know if you agree, or not.

If you’re like me, you tend to get a little antsy on planes. This airborne anxiety has nothing to do with a fear of heights or screaming babies, but rather idle time. If the flight is long enough, usually somewhere in the two-hour range, the bag of tricks I pack for myself—not unlike a mother would for her attention-deficit toddler, but with an iPod and novels rather than stuffed animals—inevitably fails me. Bored with my “toys,” my mind involuntarily wanders. And, surprisingly, that’s when I do some of my best thinking—or, as a last-ditch effort at distraction, reach for the in-flight magazine.

Even before coming to work for Spirit, one of the things I always admired about the magazine was its thoughtfulness and consideration for its audience, like that of a courteous fellow passenger. (And who doesn’t love those?) Now, as a staffer, I know the strategy behind its reader-friendly approach, which can be summed up in one made-up word: flippability, the characteristic of something one can flip through with ease. You see, each of the pages in the front of the book is specifically designed to be simultaneously simple, useful, and fun, almost as if to say to the reader, Wasn’t that great? There’s more where that came from! But all quick hits do not a well-rounded magazine make, which is why they’re supplemented with meatier feature stories. For example, “How Mya Saved Jacob,” the award-winning account of an Iraq war veteran whose relationship with his service dog, Mya, eased his struggles with PTSD. The takeaway in all this? Spirit’s glossy pages provide much more than just an escape. In fact, as evidenced by Kristin Maschka’s experience below, sometimes they even facilitate productivity. 

This week, the best-selling author and leadership consultant gave Spirit a shout-out in her blog titled “How Twitter Helped Me Beat My Monday Morning Funk.” The post details Maschka’s rediscovery of a distraction-busting article she read in the magazine—and took home with her—via a friend’s tweet. That article, or “Life App,” as we prefer to call them, was “Docent of Distraction,” which delivered a smattering of tips from Harvard Business Review columnist Peter Bregman, who recently published 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. Maschka goes on to say what tips motivated her to enter her home office and start her day (“Every morning, transfer your to-do list to a calendar and apportion times for things.”), ultimately helping to lift her funk. (“I don’t feel as guilty at the end of the day for not having accomplished more,” she says.) We’re interested to hear if she sticks with Bregman’s pointers and, if so, what the long-term benefits are.

Are you in a funk today? We can help. Even if you’re not flying, plenty of inspiration awaits you at spiritmag.com. Try Don Campbell’s productivity playlist on for size. See? Told ya.

Imagine Tripadvisor.com but with the added comfort of attributed, independent reviews alongside the gazillion user-generated, over-the top gushings of Brian and Mary W from Michigan.

How awesome would that be?

Well, you’ll probably have to wait for that particular enhancement, but not for the spiffy new Tripadvisor for apps—the just-launched Recapp website.

Unobtrusively sponsored and thoughtfully brought to you by those very good folks at Verizon Wireless (full disclosure here—we are their content awesomeness agency of record), The Recapp brings you views and aggregated independent reviews of the latest and greatest apps on the market.

Tired of not knowing whether that list of best-selling apps is real or imagineered by the harassed Director of E-Commerce?

Wondering whether there might be, gasp, a pay-to-play element in the Top 50 Apps?

Worried that there is an Angry Birds future market out there being manipulated by unscrupulous traders attempting total avian market domination?

Cast aside your worries and come and contribute to The Recapp, so that your app reviews can be added to the growing array of independent assessments of the most fun and useful additions to your mobile device!

Come and listen to our App-Meister, the masterful and engaging Adam Curry, review his latest favorite mobile app through video demos.

Yes, this was a blog post, cunningly disguised as a promo for our new App Review site—therecapp.com.

Please pass the word along (regarding the site, not the blog). Share you mobile photos with us on The Recapp through our Flickr page, rate and review new apps you’ve given a spin, and join the discussions centered around our appiverse. You’ll be helping the world make a wise choice about their next app purchase.

Now where’s my map? Brian and Mary W from Michigan really love the Kalamazoo Hilton …

We are more and more inclined within our business these days to talk about content as “liquid” or “living in buckets” or even as an “asset to be managed.” It’s an understandable development as we work with our clients to deploy their ideas and opinions and information across devices and platforms and shareable applications.
 
And while we always know that the design, appearance, look and feel of those words is implicit in our descriptor: “Content”—that’s not always apparent to the outside world, who may be looking at our skill set only in terms of writing and editing.
 
The creation of great design is fundamental to the success of presenting great editorial content. Design illuminates and amplifies the meaning and the power of words in our world—just as great product design enhances the aesthetic enjoyment and effectiveness of anything from furniture to, well, electronic devices.
 
We have an amazingly talented group of designers here at Pace, and their world is changing every bit as fast as everyone else’s—if not more so. The recent good news for them and us is the recent development (and our adoption) of the HTML 5 program that allows them the freedom to design across platforms and to focus their creative efforts on the channels and not the devices on which the content appears. We’re all excited about the high level of the work being produced—although our designers are, as usual, taking the increased attention easily in their phlegmatic and well-practiced strides!
 
In the blizzard of tributes paid to Steve Jobs over the past few days, the word “visionary” has stood out, and most of the more thoughtful paeans of praise have highlighted Steve Jobs’ obsessive attention to design and detail as a key feature of the success of Apple.
 
My favorite person to follow on Twitter is the British commentator/personality/wit Stephen Fry (@stephenfry), and his appreciation of Steve Jobs is the best I’ve read.
 
I commend it to you: http://www.stephenfry.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs/

It's a sad day in the technology world. Honestly, I can't imagine what my life would have been like without the creations of Steve Jobs. As I reflected on his passing on October 5, I couldn't help but think how technology (especially in the past decade) has shaped the success of social media.

The social media boom we are all familiar with is often attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. There's no doubting his genius and the incredible impact his networking platform has had on communications around the world. In our new social world, we collaborate, advertise and consume information in ways never possible before this millennium.

But what is the driving force behind the success of social media? There seems to be a piece of the puzzle that never gets the credit it deserves. We have to remember the technology. Without gadgets like iPhones, Androids, tablets and other mobile devices, social networks simply would not get the attention they enjoy today.

Companies like Apple and Google have created platforms that people want to interact with rather than feel they have to interact with. Would you use these services as often if you had to log on through a PC or Mac every time, and your phone was only used to make calls?

The innovative things we take for granted in our digital world have brought together hardware and software to work in perfect harmony. One often struggles to survive without the other, and we have seen that together they form a perfect combination.

The latest Apple operating system, iOS5, is due to unleash its power on the world next week. It is considered the most social friendly platform release in Apple's history. You have to admit that Apple has always understood what their consumers want better than any other company and, sometimes, even before we knew what we wanted ourselves.

So next time you "tweet," "like," connect, share, post or link to something, take a look at what you're doing it on and remember the minds that made it so easy for us.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for sharing your ideas with the world. You will be missed. 

We all know that blogging takes time, thought, motivation and passion about a particular topic. But life can overwhelm us, thus, making some of us blog quitters. But hold on! Don’t fall off the blogging wagon. Grab your content compass and find your way toward a topic that brings that feeling of excitement to the pit of your stomach. That is the type of drive that successful bloggers need.

As of February 2011, Technorati reported 156 million blogs in existence. However, many bloggers stop posting within the first three months. So, how do you keep the blog ideas flowing and build online content that ultimately engages your audience? Hopefully these tips will help you get back on track:

Routine
To be a blogger, you must blog. And the best way to become good at blogging is to do it a lot. In order for this to happen, it’s best to set a consistent schedule and blog on a regular basis. Make it a habit and part of your routine.

Manage
Set publishing goals for yourself to keep your blogging load manageable. If you realize your blog schedule is not meshing well with the other activities in your life, don’t be afraid to adjust as needed and scale back. Start out small and work your way up.

Organize
Once you have a schedule that works for you, consider getting your thoughts in order. Set an editorial calendar and spread your ideas out over a period of time. Think of it as working for a mini-newspaper and you’re the publisher. Keep a log of your ideas and fill in your calendar along the way.

Consistency
After getting in the grove of blogging, you’ll start to notice which types of posts you enjoy writing most, and which ones generate the most reader response. Take this as an opportunity to make your blogging easier by developing consistent features or building templates to add to your growing calendar. Now it looks like you’re finding your niche!

Variety
It’s the spice of life, right? Who said every post has to follow particular guidelines or always include certain material? Invite guest posters from your industry or interest group to substitute for you on occasion. Or you could try conducting an interview that turns into a question-and-answer post. You can also change up the length of posts from short to longer, in-depth stories.

Above all else, enjoy yourself! Blogging should be an expressive experience to find likeminded readers and grow your own knowledge. Make new connections and discover new ways of thinking. The more engaging your content is to your readers, the more your readers will return the favor.

Hopefully, now you’re ready to get back on path toward successful blogging. If you’re already on it, what helpful tips and tricks have kept you from quitting? Please share in the comments!

Bored with a cliché-ridden conversation? Want to turn the worst second-hand language into gems of cleverness? Well, you came to the right can of worms!

Cliché is a French onomatopoeia meaning “click”: the sound an old-fashioned typesetter makes as he taps melted lead against a cast, making a stereotype—a block of type that can be reused. People think largely in terms of stereotypes and clichés—prefab chunks of information and attitudes that combine to form perceptions and understanding.

The easiest method entails embracing the literal meaning of the expression and then taking it as far as possible. When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, she responded with a political cliché: she said she was “humbled” by the appointment. Why being appointed to one of the most powerful posts in government is “humbling” escapes me, but apparently Washington is full of these suddenly humble souls.

Some snappy answers (to be delivered at the TV or radio in front of an appreciative family):
You: Oh, I don’t blame you. It pays less than most Washington lawyers make.
You: Jeez, you do look humbled. Your posture is terrible. 

You: Yeah, I’d feel humbled too if my office dress code was Methodist Church Choir.

None of those words would be engraved on your tombstone (which really would be humbling); but you could acquire a reputation for your witty virtual retorts. The point here is to agree with the speaker disagreeably. Think about the most over-the-top way of agreeing.
Significant Other: Wake up, sleepy-head! The early bird catches the worm!
You: You bet. I’m going to catch that worm and murder the early-rising son of a night crawler.

While ironic reinforcement gives more immediate satisfaction, you can buck up a cliché without any irony at all, especially if you happen to agree with it.
Friend: There’s nothing new under the sun.

You: Not even the sun.
Friend: The most important thing in a marriage is a sense of humor.

You: A big, impressive [comedic pause] sense of humor.

Whoa, your entendre just doubled. Nonetheless, you did what every red-hot lover of language should do. You cherished the cliché, had a moment of intimacy, and then did your best to make something of it.